Three purified diets were formulated using fish meal, soya bean, wheat flour, palm oil, minerals and maltose. The carbohydrate in the diets was increased from 5 to 15% by changing the cellulose content to study the effect of dietary carbohydrate level on the growth parameters of Nile tilapia Oreochromis niloticus. The protein and the lipid contents were kept constant in all the diets. The resul...

The objective of this study was to identify the presence of harmful drug residues (Chloramphenicol and malachite green/gentian violet) and toxic heavy metals (lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury) in imported tilapia fillets. A total of 36 tilapia fillets were analyzed for these harmful chemical contaminants. The presence of veterinary drug residues were identified using competitive ELISA screeni...

The organization of the microtubules and actin filaments in the gills of tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) larvae was revealed by confocal microscopy. The fluorescence intensity of the microtubules in the gills was increased by adding wheat germ agglutinin (WGA, 40 ng ml-1) to the ambient water for 30 min, but the staining pattern of the actin filaments was not changed. The fluorescence intensi...

Habitat use and diets of five tilapiine populations of the Upper Zambezi River Basin in Zambia, south-central Africa, were examined during the 8 month descending phase of the annual hydrological cycle. All species occurred across a range of habitats, with most individuals captured from lagoons. Tilapia rendalli, a macrophyte feeder, was the only dietary specialist. Ontogenetic diet shifts were ...

vasa is a highly conserved RNA helicase involved in animal germ cell development. Among vertebrate species, it is typically present as a single copy per genome. Here we report the isolation and sequencing of BAC clones for Nile tilapia vasa genes. Contrary to a previous report that Nile tilapia have a single copy of the vasa gene, we find evidence for at least three vasa gene loci. The vasa gen...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are ~22-nucleotide noncoding RNAs that play a crucial role in regulating muscle development. Our previous study shows that miR-206 is specifically expressed in tilapia skeletal muscle, and exhibits a dynamic expression pattern at different developmental stages. Here, we reveal that miR-206 emerges as a crucial regulator of tilapia growth. miR-206 loss of function leads to the...

The African cichlid Oreochromis mossambicus (Mozambique tilapia) has been used as a model system in a wide range of behavioural and neurobiological studies. The increasing number of genetic tools available for this species, together with the emerging interest in its use for neurobiological studies, increased the need for an accurate hodological mapping of the tilapia brain to supplement the ava...

The objective of this work was to evaluate a Bayesian model-based clustering method to identify the strains of Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) individuals from fish farms in Southern Brazil. Assignment methods using nine microsatellite loci were applied to differentiate individuals of five reference strains (GIFT, GST, Nilótica, Chitralada, and Saint Peter) and to identify individuals of u...

We established a method of directly detecting Clostridium botulinum type C cells, while minimizing spore detection, in the intestinal contents of Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus). This technique involved extraction of predominantly cellular DNA from tilapia intestinal tracts and used a polymerase chain reaction assay to detect presence of type C1 toxin gene. We consistently detected...

Although euryhaline teleosts can adapt to environmental fluctuation of salinity, their energy source for responding to changes in salinity and osmolarity remains unclear. This study examines the cellular localization of creatine kinase (CK) expression in branchia of tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus). Western blot analysis of muscle-type CK (MM form) revealed a high association with salinity cha...